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(Junior
Sailors Evan Despard and Kevin OConnor hoist their
Spinnaker for the first time on their Mirror Dinghy.
11-5-2010)
Join the Club and enjoy a new experience in our
Junior sailing.
membership details
here..... |
The Mirror is a highly successful pram
dinghy, with more than 70,000 built.
The
Mirror was named after the Daily Mirror.. The
Mirror dinghy was from the start promoted as an
affordable boat, and it has probably done more than
any other design to make dinghy sailing available to
anyone.
Designed by Jack Holt
and TV do-it-yourself expert Barry Bucknell in 1962,
the Mirror employed a novel construction method
where sheets of marine plywood are held together
with copper stitching and fibreglass tape. This is
called tack and tape or stitch and tape
construction. Buoyancy is provided by four
independent integral chambers rather than by bags.
It was originally designed to be built with simple
tools and little experience, and this meant that the
design was quite unsophisticated - for example, a
simple dagger board is used instead of a hinged
centreboard The result, however, was a robust,
versatile and fairly light boat that can be easily
maintained and repaired, and can also be got into
the water very quickly from storage or transport.
Its Gunter rig, with a gaff that effectively doubles
the height of the mast, means that the spars can be
packed inside the hull for easy storage or
transportation. Secondhand boats can be found
relatively cheaply.
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